


when snow falls at midsummer

by bloomerie



Series: buttercup [3]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Jaskier | Dandelion, Consent Issues, F/F, F/M, Female Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lack of Communication, Non-Linear Narrative, Soft Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, This is not a fun story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:40:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22404292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomerie/pseuds/bloomerie
Summary: Jaskier's policy for unwanted advances is, and always been, appeasement. Neither Geralt nor Yennefer know quite what to do with that.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: buttercup [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599100
Comments: 29
Kudos: 886





	when snow falls at midsummer

**Author's Note:**

> People asked (or at least made comments) about wanting to know what Geralt/Yen's reactions would be to finding out about Jaskier's deep seated issues, so rather than confine it to one scene, I thought hey, why not make it its own separate fic?
> 
> This is also weirdly academic.

The late summer heat is an oppressive thing on the night Geralt discovers Jaskier standing in the Oxenfurt public stable two months after their last parting in Aedirn, her face pressed into her old mare’s mane with her fingers of one clutched around a clump of straw. She’s not crying, but her hitched breathing and shaking backing are near enough, and she doesn’t hear him approach until he eases open the door to Żyto’s rented stall. 

At the sound, she doesn’t startled, but stills. Her chest stops moving, caught mid-inhale. Disquiet and something that’s not quite fear tangles in his gut when he says, “Hey, Jask. Who was it?” His voice is weary, and his posture equally so, but rarely is he forced to confront humanity’s darkened edges as fully as he does at the too-familiar sight of Jaskier struggling to stay calm. 

She half turns, one hand still tangled in straw and the chestnut mane as the other rubs her reddened eyes. “Hi,” she says, and sniffles. Acute anxiety reverts her back to the flighty girl of fifteen he met at the Edge of the World, the effect not helped by the dim firelight flickering from the torches on the far wall. “What are you doing in Oxenfurt?”

“I should be asking you the same question,” he says, folding his arms and leaning against the stall’s hinges. “Just a contract for me.”

“I was the commencement speaker for the university’s graduation,” she says, shoulders dropping. “The head of the music department requested I write an article for their journal last year and I did. It’s how I was invited. Then there was a party.” She gestures at herself vaguely with her free hand, indicating the green dress that he hadn’t registered initially as a ball gown. “There’s always a party, isn’t there?”

Her misery congeals with the humidity, suffocating them in the confined space. When it comes to Jask, there  _ is _ always a party, and when it comes to parties, she very rarely leaves with a smile on her face. Geralt hates social gatherings himself, especially of that nature, but he also hates when she goes alone. It’s irrational; she’s past twenty now, an adult, and insists she can navigate the world without protection. Still, wary, he asks again, “Who was it?” 

Just as there’s always a party, there’s also always someone there to ruin it. She scruffs the sole of her ballroom slipper into the dirt, focused on the ground, and says, “Professor Eudarius. He’s the head editor for the  _ Oxenfurt Journal of Music Theory.  _ I don’t have  _ that _ much pride, but is it too much to ask that I have at least one thing without it feeling like I only got it because a man wants to fuck me?” Unfamiliar anger coils in her ending words, buried deep but simmering. 

Reassurance crowds in Geralt’s mouth, but dries to nothing upon the realisation that he doesn’t know what to say. The heat makes it worse; it turns his thoughts sluggish. Though he would like to tell her that she receives each and every offer to come her way through merit of her skill alone, he doesn’t know if it’s true. “What happened?” he says instead. “Did he try anything?” 

She isn’t injured, at least, because otherwise he would have smelt the blood. Still avoiding his gaze, she says, “He didn’t get far. I made my excuses to leave too soon after he started.” Again, she rubs her eye, and finally lets her hand fall from Żyto, who whinnies soft and nudges her hair. She pats the mare’s neck absentmindedly. “I’m probably just overreacting, though,” she says, and breathes deeply, the sound rattling in her chest, before she looks his way, smile returned to her face. It’s insubstantial, unreal. “You know me. I always need to be dramatic even when there’s no reason. And now I’ve run out of a party where I’m a guest of honour. At least I’ve given Redanian society something new to gossip about. How did you know I was here?” 

Though Geralt could never disagree with the assessment that the girl  _ can  _ be melodramatic about one situation or another, he does disagree that she’s ever overreacted to other people’s unwanted attention. “I just boarded Roach,” he says, and jerks his head in the direction of his girl’s stall, shrouded as it is in shadow. “Do you have other clothes?” 

She glances at her dress, which, upon closer inspection, looks stitched from summer leaves and as though it weighs more than she does. “Yes,” she says, sighing. “I still have the farmer boy’s clothes, the poor dear. What’s the contract?”

“Another wraith,” he says, and steps away from the wall. It’s a professor of natural history who commissioned him, but she doesn’t need to know that. “I’ll finish with Roach.”

In the last six years, seeing each other in various states of undress has become routine, but he can offer her this moment of bodily privacy. Something in him, buried deeper than she buries her anger, tugs at him when he lets the stall door swing shut behind his retreating back. There’s a conversation trapped between them that he doesn’t know how to start, and that she’s actively working to avoid. He very rarely cares about anyone beyond the duration of a chance encounter, but Jaskier’s burrowed into his life as surely as he burrowed into Yennefer’s. For the most part, he doesn’t need to worry about Yen, who causes trouble more often than she draws it, but the same can’t be said for Jask. 

Jaskier is human, and she’s small, and she’s  _ skittish.  _ That’s the problem. 

As he finishes setting Roach’s hay, she appears at his stall door, arms crossed across her chest. “Where to?” she says, eyes following him as he reaches for his swords. The boy’s clothes from Aedirn are just a simple shirt and trousers tucked into her own riding boots, but they’ll do. It’s only Oxenfurt, after all. 

“Not far,” he says, and slings the strap over his shoulders. 

When he exits the stall, she falls into easy step beside him, venturing with him from the stable and into the soup-like humidity heady with the stale smell of the slow river and cloying flowers. Her nose crinkles, but then the expression is gone as quick as it came, and she starts up a rambling tale about two knights in Vizimia who fought for her hand. There’s a skip in her walk, and steadily, the tension slips from her shoulders into the heat.

They do not talk about this night again.

There’s an unspoken conversation lurking in the shadows. It’s one Jaskier wishes to avoid. 

“I need  _ notes _ ,” she says instead, after she wakes on Yennefer’s bed, her arm burning along the line of the rose thorn’s path when it travelled beneath her skin. From her fingertip to the incision Yen cut just below the junction of her shoulder, the curse’s residual darkness zings, up and down, swirling ill-intent into her blood. “How was the reception? Were my adoring fans dying of concern? Did the ladies gasp in scandalised wonderment when Geralt rolled me into his manly arms?”

For good measure, she graces her friends with her most careless grin, but the effort, for once, falls flat. Shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the bed, Geralt and Yen stand in a bubble of disapproval. Soft torchlight outlines them from behind in a corona that leaves their faces partly darkened. Geralt scowls, arms folded and muscles taunt while Yen’s spine stays as straight and tense as a schoolmarm’s rod. The conversation lurking in the shadows at the bedroom’s edges creep closer, cooling the warmth the hearth exudes. 

Jaskier swallows hard, and crosses her legs beneath her heavy skirts. “It’s no real fuss now that you’ve got me well again,” she says, forcing down the panic threatening to take hold of her voice. “I mean, it was all very scary when I was actually doing the fainting I will admit, but fate saw to it that you were there did it not? Yennefer and Geralt, saving the life of their damsel again. I’ll write you two something wonderful for your trouble.” 

Again, silence meets her words. Then Geralt says, in a near enough growl, “Oxenfurt is fucking cursed.” 

“Well,” Jaskier says, “I have no argument against that.” 

“That was personal,” Yen says before Jaskier can begin another evasive ramble. She feels her treacherous face pale. “Blood magic is expensive. Who did you piss off that can afford it?” 

Geralt’s jaw clenches, and the sidelong look he sends Yennefer’s way is hard to decipher, but he doesn’t add anything. When Jaskier’s heart jumps, she wonders if they can hear it. 

With a shrug, she says honestly, “Quite a lot of people. Even just like  _ week _ when I first arrived, I happened upon—”

“Someone you’ve known for a long time.” Yen stares at her, daring her to lie. Unfortunately, Jaskier’s forgotten how to tell the truth instead. 

This is the truth, in its skeletal form: 

Just a month ago she performed the full ballad she wrote to chronicle Geralt’s story in Rivia’s royal court, and received an invitation from a breathless messenger as she readied to leave requesting she be the showcase for Oxenfurt’s annual autumnal theatrical festival. As much as she hates Oxenfurt, it was too much of an honour to decline, and there was no reason to expect true disaster. She met Geralt and Yennefer right before her performance at the Redanian National Theatre, where Mistress Basia requested she play her folk songs of all things. It was perfect. Audience reaction was perfect. They threw flowers instead of rotten vegetables, and crowded her when she hopped from the stage. Then the boy with the soot-smudged face and a bouquet of roses appeared. After that, her memory is dim, and finally, nonexistent. 

According to Yen, the roses were meant to kill her. A throne pierced her skin and tried to work its way to her heart. There’s more, but they haven’t told her yet. 

Jaskier flits her gaze from Geralt’s unsettlingly anger to Yen’s intensity. “I must admit,” she says, careful to keep her tone light, “that still describes a frighteningly long list of people. I’ve had sex with many a noblewoman’s husband. And many a husband’s wife. Considering how common extra-marital affairs are among the wealthy, you would think they’d be more accepting.” 

“The boy said ‘your oldest fan,’” Geralt says, just as blunt as Yennefer, just as blunt as always. 

“You wouldn’t let Geralt touch you,” she adds, arching one perfect brow as her hands drift to her hips. “You screamed. You aren’t completely oblivious, Jaskier. Who was it?” 

With a twitch of her shoulders that’s meant to be a shrug, Jaskier answers, “I don’t know,” and lets her gaze finally fall to her lap, where her skirts sag in the dip created over her ankles. Her head aches, she realises. Stress and discomfort twist at her until she feels sick. She says, “That describes a lot of people.”

Let them interpret that as they will. Yen’s desire to take revenge pulsates through the air, mingling with the conversation they’re all still sidestepping and Geralt’s distrust of his ability with words. Had Jaskier screamed? When? She can’t recall. There’s a blank spot in her memory, a black hole containing everything she prefers to avoid. Unspoken conversations. Blood curses. A blistering afternoon on a riverside where she screamed and screamed and screamed. She was breathing in dry wine and sunlight, steady on soft grass but falling all the same under the weight of violence and violation. Hands. Blood. Bruises that faded. An attack that had the audacity to leave her no scars. 

Is Kuna still alive? She doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to know. What she doesn’t want to know is if he’s still good enough to make a decent amount of coin, if he remained in Oxenfurt all these years, if he’s so petty he would try to murder her for surpassing him. 

Sadly, that wouldn’t surprise her. 

Yen sighs. “I can’t help if you won’t let me,” she says, snappish, but Jaskier shouldn’t be blamed for not answering a question never asked. 

“You shouldn’t go back to Oxenfurt,” Geralt says, drawing her attention again. His mouth is thinned, and in the firelight, his eyes are orange. 

“I can’t avoid it,” she says, tone mirroring Yen’s. “It’s too important to the arts. I write for the university’s journal. It’s a focal point for itinerant performer culture.” 

“You hate it.”

“I  _ know. _ ”

They glare at her and she at them until Geralt relents. “Find me,” he says, leaving no room for argument. “Next time.” 

Though she should protest that she’s an adult and can very well take care of herself, she holds her tongue. There’s little to accomplish from undertaking a fight she only feels she needs for the sake of her pride because in the end, she doesn’t want to return alone. After all, she’s only human. 

When she nods, Yen smirks, slow and slick like a satisfied cat. “Good,” she says. “Now I don’t need to worry about you dying. Is anyone else hungry?”

There’s a conversation lurking in the shadows. Jaskier is careful not to let it spring.

Yennefer argues with Geralt about Jaskier only once—though perhaps  _ argue _ is too severe a term. 

It happens in a village that’s almost town just a stone’s throw away from Nilfgaard’s northern border, where someone’s been killing young women. Dawn seeps its white light over the river and hills, glinting off the frost without the promise of warmth. Today is winter at its coldest, so thankfully, Jaskier is otherwise engaged for a seasonal celebration in Cidaris and hadn’t insisted on joining them.

They hide, shielded behind Yennefer’s spells, in the first floor study in the mayor’s house, the tallest building in the village, watching out the window for danger. She sits reclining in a well padded chair, her crossed ankles propped on the window sill, while he stands beside them, arms folded as he leans again to frame to better view the streets. If it weren’t for the high likelihood that the killer is one of Frigilla’s mages, Yennefer wouldn’t be here. Frankly, she would be in Cidaris with Jaskier, because what they have is still _ new _ and she’s curious to explore—a fact she states as a sideways sort of comment after the fifth hour where they see naught but foxes and bats. It’s offhand. She says, “This day would have been far more productive spent keeping Jaskier in her week’s feather bed.”

When his back tenses, she isn’t expecting it. Though she generally finds him easy to read, the look he casts her over his shoulder is inscrutable. 

Her eyebrow twitches. “Oh, don’t leave me in suspense,” she says. “What is it?” 

Still, it’s a moment before he responds. She knows that the delay, in truth, is because he wants to trust his words convey his exact meaning, but his deliberation annoys her regardless. Finally, he says, “You need to be careful with her. And how you speak about her.”

“What?” Yennefer lets her feet drop, sitting straighter. “What have a done wrong now?”

“She’s not a thing to be kept.”

“I know that!” 

And so she does. Jaskier is a shining light, a flame in the darkness, surviving in a world bent on extinguishing sundrops, but existence like that is its own form of uncaged chaos. But she’s more than that as well, as far as metaphors go—a rich girl’s doll perhaps, beautifully delicate by design, and one knock away from shattering to unfixable shards. 

Yennefer knows this perfectly well, as well as Geralt does, and therefore can’t be blamed for how she bristles from accusation that she’s just as careless as anyone else. His scowl is condemnatory. She reacts. She says, before he can answer, “She made it clear enough last year that she’s as on board with this as we are. Or have you changed your mind?”

With a shake of his head, he says, “Get her consent, Yen. Every time. She doesn’t know how to say no.” 

That throws her. She never checked beyond surface level into Jaskier’s thoughts (nor Geralt’s) as a matter of principle, but she knows the girl’s reputation. “She never shown qualms about touching you,” she says, but warily now, because he’s careful with his words and keen in his observations. 

He shrugs, as if to say,  _ I’m not other people.  _ Then, after another awful pause, says, “She performed for Queen Calanthe. She was sixteen. I lost sight of her for five minutes. Some lord led her back in. It wasn’t the last time, and I don’t think it was the first.” 

“And you haven’t done anything about this?” During the incident in Oxenfurt with the blood curse, she suspected  _ something _ must have happened, but it would have likely occurred before Jaskier met Geralt, and she was just so young at the time. If she were raped that early in her life, Yennefer would have detected it. She had that day, after all, taken a peak at what the woman was thinking. 

Unfortunately, he knows Jaskier better than she does, and his judgment is sound. “I can’t,” he says, frustrated. “She laughs it off or says she overreacted. At least after Cintra, nothing’s happened while I’m with her.”

Just as Yennefer goes to answer, a screech cuts through the winter dawn, drawing them back to the task at hand. 

Three months after Yen leaves Geralt and Geralt abandons Jaskier at the dragon’s lair, he takes a commission for Duchess Anna Henrietta of Beauclair. He’s there not a day, and in the castle not an hour, when he notices the painting. It’s hard not to, positioned as it is in the long hall leading to throne room, where artworks hang on display as if in a gallery. He falters when he first sees it, occupied by the Captain of Guard’s summary of the murder investigation thus far, but returns later when he has a moment alone. 

Despite what he hopes, his moment alone doesn’t last long, as the Duchess joins him within minutes. “I have no love for the girl,” the woman says, following his gaze to the painting above them, “but it would be a shame to hide such a fine work of art. Others, too, enjoy seeing it. I hear it may be the only portrait of her.” Glancing at him, she adds, “Do you find it accurate, Geralt?” 

Though the question lacks malice, guilt still stabs at him. “Accurate enough.”

And so it is. Jask’s image is forever frozen in a series of short brush strokes and bright colours. She’s not performing for the court; the painter captured her on the veranda overlooking the water at sunset, poised on the marble bench with her back against a rose covered column and her legs stretched as she tunes her lute. The dress she wears is the same one she lost to the djinn. Her hair’s loose, but the ribbons are too golden and the brown too flat. Her skin’s too white for summer. She’s not thin enough, and her shape just too...much. Her eyes aren’t the right shade of blue. Cornflower, Yen said. Whatever colour the painter chose isn’t that. 

There are other, smaller details also missing. On her left hand there should be a scar from the time before they met when a string snapped and ripped across her knuckles. Above the collar of dress should a cluster of freckles, dark as spilled ink drops. Three months ago, on the night before the dragon hunt, they crowded together in a bath, and he ran a soaped rag over those freckles to wash away blood that wasn’t hers. She was laughing at something while he did it, careless and happy. He can’t remember what he said. 

Beside him, the Duchess is saying, “Master René calls it  _ Creation _ , privately, but it’s easier to claim its name is  _ Jaskier _ . More than a few who have seen it called it  _ The Whore _ .”

Barely avoiding a scowl, Geralt returns his attention to the Duchess. He only realised that she and Jaskier’s Annarietta were the same person this morning. 

At his expression, the woman shrugs, upsetting the curls draped over her shoulders. “She said she would return,” she continues, before fixing him with a stare that holds judgment and accusation. “Every word I have heard of her since she left Beauclair also includes you.”

“She was seventeen,” he says, quicker and sharper than he intends. And she was, then. In ten years she never told him why she left Toussaint. Now, from the painting and the Duchess, he’s forcibly reminded for not the first time since the day on the mountain summit that he always intended to treat her  _ better _ , and in the end, couldn’t manage even that. No one else deserve their story, though, so he says, “We travelled together. That’s it,” and leaves it there.

“As you say,” the Duchess says, and clearly doesn’t believe him in the slightest.

This is how it happens: 

Jaskier sits on a marble bench overflowing with delicate pink carnations and bowing gerbera daisies of similar shade, her lower back pressed to a ridged column choked in red roses carefully dethroned, as she bends over her lute to twist the strings into tune. She’s a vision, a lover’s daydream formed right from her own songs—all bright white and bright yellow framed against the pink red flowers and bleeding sunset. Her focus on her task is absolute. She doesn’t notice Annarietta standing in the garden entrance examining the scene she creates.

When Annarietta says, “I will have you painted,” Jaskier startles, clutching her lute to her chest so the strings twang and banging her knee into the stone wall. The other woman is half in shadow, but what sunset light touches her smooths away the day’s weariness with a soft gold so she seems timeless.

Uncertain, Jaskier smiles, the expression crooked. “Your master artists would never lower themselves to painting me,” she says. 

“On the contrary,” Annarietta says in that tone that’s mild but still means she will accept no argument, “several have expressed the desire to do so already.”

In the time Jaskier has been in court, the only portraits she’s seen are of the family and their equally noble relatives or ancestors. The artwork that lines the main galleries are still lifes or landscapes or scenes from legend. Something pricks at her skin. It’s doubtful, after all, that Annarietta is raising her to familial status regardless of how many nights Jaskier spends in her bed, and she is not a woman from myth. 

What option that leaves for her place here is one she doesn’t appreciate.

“Are you sure you can spare me for how long it will take?” she asks, one brow quirked in a final effort to avoid this, but Annarietta says she can for the length of the sketch at the very least. 

That alone takes a week. She inspects when she can, much to the artist’s chagrin, a crystalline glass of wine usually in hand as though she means to uphold an expected image of herself. “This is inaccurate,” she says at one point, crossly, glancing from the canvas to Jaskier, who sits statue still on the bench, and back again. “That is not her body.”

“Lady Jaskier is very beautiful,” Master René says, his irritation thinly veiled, “but anyone who casts their eyes upon a portrait of woman expects to see a  _ woman _ , Lady Duchess. I mean no offense to Lady Jaskier, but her body is closer to that of a boy’s. No, no, stay still.”

Abruptly, Jaskier snaps her head back to her lute, and struggles to keep the frown from her face. Annarietta protests on her behalf, claiming that only a man would have such expectations, but eventually bends to the  _ artist’s expertise _ and allows him to do what he will. Jaskier leaves before the painting is finished, and doesn’t see the result for ten years. 

This is how it happens:

Jaskier has been Jaskier for a month, but that does not keep Obdarta Lalka and Julia from rattling around her head. When she tells the innkeep, “I can find lodging elsewhere,” in the dying logging village in Lyria, it’s Obdarta Lalka who’s speaking, or maybe Julia. One or the other, who knows only a black rot fear tearing into her limbs. 

But the man is insistent. His hand is on her lower back, the heat of him scorching her through the thin fabric of her ragged dress. She clutches her stolen lute to her chest as though it will shield her and feels her youth etched into her thin face and stretched across her shapeless body. He’s not tall, but he’s thick, every inch of him made of corded muscle gained from three decades of swinging an axe. His eyes are black. His smile is all teeth. 

The inn is empty. It’s late. A single candle burns on the bartop, revealing only a small circle of the room. They aren’t in it.

A memory of shattering pain rips at her. There’s no one here, she thinks, and then she thinks about pain, and about avoiding it, and about control. About how she has two options, and how she never wants Jaskier to be a victim. 

She tightens her grip further on her lute. Then she says, “All right,” and, “I’ll stay,” and allows him to lead her away. 

Yennefer argued with Geralt about Jaskier only once, but the conclusion they drew that early dawn in the village just north of Nilfgaard’s border remains with her even after she leaves him at the mouth of the dragon’s lair. This is why she returns to Oxenfurt in the following autumn, a city that she dislikes and Jaskier despises, for the annual theatrical festival. The night of Jaskier’s final performance falls prematurely into darkness, the sun swallowed an hour past noon by a torrential rain that threatens to drown the cobbled streets. 

It’s a good night for a curse. 

That’s the thought that dominates the forefront of Yennefer’s thoughts, even after she runs into her friend Triss, who decides without preamble to join her where she sits on the farthest corner of the domed amphitheatre’s top left row. Together, they sip at ale better than any Nilfgaard has to offer, and watch Jask flit across the raised stage to a tune another minstrel ensemble plays for her in the wings. “She’s very...pretty,” Triss says, head tilted towards the stage and eyes sweeping up and down to follow Jaskier’s dance. “And you’re— _ you?  _ The two of you?” Her gaze skips back to Yennefer, large as ever and bright from curiosity. “You never struck me as the sort to like prancing poets.”

“She’s energetic,” Yennefer says, because that’s true, even if it’s not a real explanation. She’s not willing to offer more; already she heard a rumour from a reliable enough source about Triss and Geralt, but knows he wouldn’t tumble so soon into the arms of another woman without certain _ persuasion. _ A year isn’t long for people like them. Whether it was his fault or not, she understands him well enough to know the wound of losing both she and Jaskier at once will be too raw.

Regardless, Yen’s unwilling to press the issue. She has few friends, and the idea of losing one over a man who’s no longer her lover is disagreeable. Easier to accept that the rumours are only that: rumours.

But that does not mean Yennefer has an obligation to disclose her reasons for staking a claim on Jaskier the Songstress—to disclose that she’s learned that chaos comes in more forms than Aretuza taught them, that the quickness in which the candle of human life burns does not lessen the flame’s strength, that Jask is so magnetic that it’s unsurprising to see the world throw themselves at her feet. Yennefer was never one to craft poetry herself, but Jaskier draws out that language. She finishes the current piece, the silly autobiographical one about the songstress born in a field of yellow flowers, and curtsies low in time to the audience’s applause. The black and white dress Yennefer designed her personally seems to shift in shape, cutting her a more severe figure, when a stagehand in the wings extinguishes a couple torches. A boy runs out with her lute while another situates a stool centre stage, and in the moment Jaskier’s hands touch her instrument, Yennefer feels an unfamiliar spike of panic. 

Nothing happens. Jask sits, and Yennefer breathes easily once again. 

“Are you all right?” Triss asks, noting the fleeting change in mood. Her brow knits, and a draft teases the tendrils of her hair not bunched back from her face. 

As Yennefer answers, “Oxenfurt doesn’t agree with her,” Jaskier situates herself on the stool, lute in hand. The crimson ribbon in her hair shimmers in the firelight. 

Then she strums her first note. Just before she begins her song, she searches out Yennefer, catches her eye, and smiles in a way that’s small and private and just for her. 

“‘ _ Beyond seven mountains, beyond seven rivers,’ _ ” she sings, “ _ there lived a lark who loved a raven, who prayed for the goodwill fate may deliver _ —’”

The crowd is silent. Overhead, the rain beats against the ceiling, the sound a perfect accompaniment to the tune, as though Jask timed it to fall. Triss, incredulous, far too low for anyone but Yennefer to hear, says, “No one ever said you ended up with  _ two  _ devotees. I did wonder why you bothered to come.” 

Before Yennefer can snap an answer, Jask’s eyes find hers again, and stay fixed. “‘ _ Said the lark to the raven, For a kiss I shall at your feet lay my heart still beating, split my skin upon a thorn until I am bleeding, my last wish be that ’til I die you do keep me warm.’ _ ”

Exasperated, Triss says, “You and your love for beautiful things.”

Though Yennefer prefers not to think of Geralt, his voice comes back to her now. “Jaskier’s not a thing to be kept,” she says. She doesn’t understand how so few people seem to realise this, that just because a song is for popular consumption does not mean that the songstress is also beholden to the public eye. 

Triss blinks, and her mouth loses its teasing twist. “You’re right,” she says, tone more serious now. “I’m sorry.”

Yennefer isn’t the one who needs an apology, but Jaskier, she learned, very rarely gets what she deserves. Last year, Yennefer was as guilty of callous behaviour as anyone else. The performance ends, leaving in its wake a reverent silence that shatters into the crowd’s applause as Jaskier’s eyes, again, find hers. 

The late winter wind is a vicious thing on the night Jaskier and Geralt fall into each on the floor of a vacant cave somewhere in the Blue Mountains’ subalpine zone. It howls, whistling in a death trill, at the mouth, snow billowing in to coat the entrance and startle the horses. A strong fire sputters beside them, casting black shadows that wriggle across the uneven walls. Even with their travelling cloaks and bedrolls spread beneath her back, sharp stones still prod at her spine, but she ignores their bite as surely as she ignores the cold set into her bones, or the ice patches in her hair. 

Faintly, to their left beyond the cave, she hears the soft lap of water splash over the hole in lake’s frozen surface, the one the water hag made when it snagged her by the ankle and ripped her down, down, down. He asked, “Can I?” while already paring her winter dress from her skin. How cliche this is, to have a desperate need for heat be what drives her to spread her legs. She wonders if her lips are blue.

When he kisses her, the action is cautious. There’s a question caught unspoken in his mouth, a repeat of his first woven into the cracks the wind gouged into his lips. For once, she answers him in kind—in nonverbal reassurance. Her own lips, just as abused as his, she parts; she slides her one hand through the stubble on her jaw to tangle in his hair; the other rests on his back, on a gnarled scar she watched him receive in a fight with a manticore; one knee she bends, and where her calf brushes his waist, she feels another scar, one she knows he carries from Blaviken.

Though this will be the first time they have sex, she’s known his body as intimately as a lover for years.

He does ask directly, eventually. “Are you sure, Jask?” he says, meeting her eye to eye as if searching for uncertainty, or a lie. His refract the firelight flatly, inhuman. Against her inner thigh, she  _ feels _ how aroused he is, hard and long. He balances his weight on one forearm, positioned over her, and the opposite hand he has across her stomach.

Sometimes she forgets how much bigger he is than she, but his hand is a stark reminder—with his fingers spread, he covers easily the width of her abdomen, and the length from her solar plexus to her hips. It should be terrifying, but she trusts him with everything she is, and that. Well. That’s it’s own sort of terror. 

Mouth dry, she nods. He stares at her, hard, so after a beat, she manages, “Yes.” 

Her body is still so cold she thinks her heart might freeze, if only exhilaration weren’t keeping it pounding double time. When he kisses her again, she tugs him down, blanketing her body more fully with the warmth of his. His hand slides up between them to cup breast, which shamefully fills not even his palm. 

She’s not like Yennefer, some of unfathomable beauty who will live a thousand lifetimes, so why they’ve chosen her is a mystery she can’t be bothered to solve. Usually, men and women alike only want Jaskier the Songstress for the privilege of bragging they’ve been in her skirts. Maybe that is why, she thinks as Geralt burns away the ice in her blood with his body’s heat, she’ll give he and Yen all of her, if only they ask. 

Three months after Geralt and Yen abandon Jaskier at the mouth of a dragon’s mountaintop lair, she returns alone to Oxenfurt. It’s on the university’s invitation, which is one of two reasons she’ll to the city, because the new head of the music department requests her to be the guest speaker for the start of term’s first symposium. The day she arrives is one of dreamlike perfection, the sky an unbroken cobalt above the city with the sunlight that sort of candied gold only possible in mid-autumn. Even the worst areas of the city transform into a fairy tale setting on a day like this, but natural splendor does little to calm her. 

The symposium is, essentially, on interweaving regional dialect into ballads in a way that won’t insult local communities (though she dresses the title and talk in fancier language that won’t scandalise scholars who think they can do no wrong). It’s a morning lesson, so she arrives the day before, and procures a room at one of the nicer inns (on the university’s stipend) for a single night. Performing in Oxenfurt is always good money, but she’ll avoid it if she can, especially now that she’s alone. Now that Geralt and Yen proved she’s not worth their time. 

It’s been three months, but the sting of that hasn’t lessened. 

When the new invitation comes, hand delivered by a local stagehand she knows from the national theatre, she almost rejects it. _Catch up between friends_ , Priscilla’s neat, looping script reads, the letters crammed across the centre of the theatre’s stationary. _Thistle_ _and Thyme sunset?_ She signed it _P._ In truth, Jaskier doesn’t know the other woman well, having only met her two years prior, but she learned as early as thirteen that making and maintaining social connections with other performers is important. 

So Jaskier goes. She has, after all, no better way to spend her evening. 

Priscilla waits at the bar with two pints of cider, still dressed in full costume from whatever play she performed earlier today. The length of the peacock feather in her hat is obscenely long. When she notices Jaskier, she grins and waves, the movement of her hand disturbing the candles in the low hanging chandelier above her head. Her lipstick is so red it turns her mouth into an open wound. 

“I wasn’t certain you would come,” she says after they exchange greetings and Jaskier settles into the open barstool. The cushion is velvet, far nicer than any to be found outside the city, where she spends the majority of her days. “There are rumours about you, you know. That you don’t you don’t Oxenfurt society. High  _ or  _ us.”

The way Priscilla says it is matter-of-fact. As she sips her cider, and Jaskier pretends her own doesn’t exist, she says, “Libel and slander. I’m just lazier than the rest of you lot and like a good night’s sleep after a ride.”

“A lie, that’s what that is,” Priscilla says with a smile. “I’ve witnessed you sing a whole night through. Where have you been this time? It must have been a year since you came here last.” 

In truth, it’s been thirteen months, but the other woman doesn’t need to know that Jaskier keeps count. “Oh, here and there,” she says, gesturing vaguely. “I just returned from Novigrad. What about you? Any new plays running?”

Thankfully, Priscilla launches into a story about a newly hired dwarven playwright who’s done wonders for expanding the company’s range in genres. She finishes her cider and calls for another, but doesn’t seem to notice that Jaskier hasn’t touched her own. Her distaste for drinking tends to lead to unwanted questions, and even more unwanted conclusions. Priscilla, too preoccupied, just begins on her second pint, and deviates into a summary about the next two plays they have in lineup, though neither are quite finished. It’s a relief to listen to her, to another performer passionate about her craft, so Jaskier gives all the attentiveness she deserves.

She doesn’t, as a result, notice the other members of the company enter. 

“Priscilla!”

A male voice coloured with the unmistakable average dwarven accent resounds from the direction of the entrance. Priscilla twists at the waist so the bells on her skirts jangle and holds aloft her cider so it sloshes as she calls, “Oh! Friends! Join us!”

As a motley mix of cheers rise in response, Jaskier turns, the action more instinctive than born of interest. First she spies the dwarf, a ginger with a full beard and a barrel of a chest shouldering through the public house’s tightly packed patrons. Then she notes the rest, none of whom she recognises, and finally—

“So this is sure to be the famous Jaskier,” says a reedy man with a sharp goatee, who Priscilla’s already introducing as the company’s new manager. “You says she weren’t coming ’til the week after.” 

Though Priscilla answers, Jaskier doesn’t hear it. She can’t draw a breath; her body’s gone to ice. Around her falls away, her friend and the company, the friendly candlelight and mid-autumn warm, the monotonous background chatter. What’s left is a nightmare made real, aged in time with her but not so changed as to be unrecognisable. His hair is more silver than black now, his moustache gone, weight gathered on his gut, and new wrinkles lining his face, but he’s still  _ him _ . 

And she’s still her. 

In the same moment she realises who he is, he recognises her, and sweeps the bonnet off his head to dip into a flourishing bow. “Kuna,” he says as he straightens, already reaching for her, “at your service. I have been wanting to meet the mysterious Jaskier of Oxenfurt. You are most...elusive.”

What Velen accent he once had is as undetectable as her own Keracki lilt. She swallows hard, and struggles to gather her thoughts. She watches the trajectory of his hand in its quest for hers, where it rests curled in her lap. She thinks,  _ Move _ . She thinks it, but her body doesn’t cooperate. Suddenly, she’s separate from herself, an observer rather than a participant of the scene. 

His fingertips are callused from plucking at lute strings, and his skin has the worn leather texture developed from age. When he presses a kiss to the back of her hand, his lips are soft. “It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance,” he says as she snatches her hand from his, and adds, “Jaskier,” in a slow long drawl, like her name is a secret he can be trusted to keep. 

“Ach, dinna fash yerself,” says the dwarf, standing beside the barstool, arms crossed and angled between them. She realises she’s holding the hand he touched to her chest, clutching it with the other, and that she hasn’t breathed since she first laid eyes on him. To her, the dwarf says, “Yer looking a wee peely-wally, lassie. Cilla, what in the—”

“I’m all right, thank you,” she says, and though she’s breathing again, her vision retains the hazy quality of someone suffocating. “Just tired, I think. Priscilla, it was lovely to see again, and it was very nice to meet the rest of you. We must catch up next time I’m in Oxenfurt. Unfortunately, I have a lecture to deliver bright and early tomorrow morning and really should get some much needed rest.”

There’s a general commotion from the eight of them about how she absolutely _ must _ stay, culminating in a round of goodbye kisses and embraces that leaves her heart palpitating and maintaining even breathing a struggle. Priscilla presses her mouth against hers, so the residual taste of cider lingers. It would be fine, normally, but the others see it as an open invitation, and Jaskier can’t avoid what is, technically, a traditional farewell without starting a scene, but there’s a hand, a hand on her back, and low in her ear and still loud enough for the others to hear, Kuna is saying, “You can’t leave us so soon,  _ Lady _ Jaskier. You haven’t finished your drink.”

The company manager is still leaning in, still moving for his farewell kiss, so it’s he that she addresses but Kuna she looks at when she says, “Please stop. I have a lover.”

It’s a lie, and it’s been a lie for three months. As the company falls silent, staring at her, the cavern of that lie opens beneath her. It has an internal rhythm to it, one she’s certain they can feel. 

“Who?” asks a woman two heads taller than she is with red paint still dotting the tip of her nose. “Oh, wait. Is it Geralt of Rivia? The Witcher? The White Wolf? I thought it was only rumours you two were—” 

“No,” Jaskier says, which is true, and still lies, “but Yennefer is the jealous sort. Thank you for the company. If I don’t see you before I leave, then I wish you all a very good year.”

At last, she extracts herself, ignoring the call of “Surely not Yennefer of Vengerberg!” and exits the inn to step out into the cool autumn dusk. She walks the long route back to her lodgings, and tells herself that she only imagines the eyes she feels on her back. 

There’s a conversation lurking in the corners of the room. When it springs, neither Geralt nor Yen are as prepared as they thought they would be. 

Jaskier is on the bed, curled against the wall and dressed only in one of his shirts, her hair still dripping the bath. She doesn’t look at either of them, her arms around her legs and her head buried in her knees. On both her wrists are dark bruises, ugly purple-red marks in the perfect shape of a man’s fists. Another is across her cheek, stark against her winter pale skin and reflecting the light from the hearth. Her neck is nicked. They aren’t her only injuries. Geralt saw them all when he scrubbed away the dried blood sticking to her skin. 

She doesn’t smell like herself. She smells like other men, sex, blood, and fear. 

Other than “Don’t let Ciri see me” she hasn’t spoken since she arrived, bloody and on foot with her dress torn and body so cold it forgot how to shiver, down her saddle bags, her travelling cloak, and her lute. It’s a week past midwinter, and a day later than her estimated return to Kaer Moren from the lord’s court in Kaedwen, but no one worried. Delays during winter are normal. There was no reason it should have meant imminent disaster. 

Now, several hours after her arrival at the gates, Yen sits beside her, close but not touching, and Geralt occupies the space by their feet. Too many thoughts bang about his head for him to hold on to one for long, but he knows they can’t ignore this. That  _ Jaskier  _ can’t ignore this, but also that she’ll do her best to try, and given time, so will they. 

“Jask,” Yen says eventually, in the soft tone she usually only reserves for Ciri, “say something. You’re scaring us.”

Jaskier doesn’t react. 

When Yen glances to Geralt, one corner of her mouth twists down into a frown, and her brow creases. He itches from his own concern, and from an anger that has no outlet. The ride from Kaedwen’s border, where the court Jask performed is located, and Kaer Moren should only require a single night outdoors, depending on the weather. There was snow yesterday evening, but it came down from the north, from the opposite direction. But even a short ride in fine weather isn’t a guarantee for a safe journey. She had two daggers with her, silver and iron. The silver she still had tucked in her boot straps, but the iron one is gone. 

For now, Coen and Eskel are minding Ciri. Lambert’s gone down the pass to see what he can find. Vesimir promised them privacy, at least until after the morning dawns. Keeping from Ciri that  _ something _ happened will be impossible, as they rarely bar her from the room they all share, but they can spare her the full truth. 

Suddenly Jask shakes, her body shuddering from a draft that comes whistling under the door. Yen turns, hand outheld, and the fire burns brighter at her will. 

After it becomes clear Jask won’t respond, Yen asks, “Can I touch you?”

For a moment, Jask doesn’t move—doesn’t move for long enough that Geralt assumes she won’t at all—but then she nods. It’s just a twitch of the head, but a nod nonetheless. Yen inches closer, and wraps her arms around Jaskier’s shoulders. “You’re safe now,” she says into her hair. “We’re here. No one in Kaer Moren will hurt you.”

Again, Jask gives a jerking nod. Yen looks at Geralt, and mouths “talk.”

Now, he isn’t good at talking, and he’s aware of that, but  _ Jaskier _ likes talking, so he shoves aside his own discomfort to inch closer, too. “Can you tell us where?” he asks, near now but avoiding contact. “So we can retrieve your belongings.”

An awful, broken noise that could be a snob, but could be a laugh bubbles from her. Her grip on her legs tightens as she presses her forehead harder into her knees. “It’s not supposed to happen,” she says, voice emerging for the first time in hours, just as broken as its preluding sound. “Not to  _ me, _ not like this, not  _ twice _ —”

“Twice?” He doesn’t mean to say it. The word comes out hollow even to him. 

She sobs, her whole body shaking from the effort, and he and Yen sit silent, immobile, waiting for the fit to subside. “I’ve managed to avoid it,” she says, ragged from the tears, “for fourteen fucking years just to—on the fucking road—what did I ever do to—”

“Hey, none of that,” Yen says, securing her grip. “This has nothing to do with anything you’ve done. Men are despicable sadists without encouragement.”

Jask raises her head, slowly at first, then all at once when she straightens her back. Her breathing is too fast, her fingers gripping Geralt’s shirt. “I should have fought more,” she says, her attention flitting around the room but not settling. Tears slick her flushed cheeks, still falling. “I didn’t—I never—”

As she begins to dissolve more fully into panic, he leans forward to take her free hand, the one still limp over her knees, between both of his. “Jaskier,” he says, “look at me.  _ Look  _ at me.” It’s a clear effort, but she does, though her eyes remain unfocused. Steady, deliberate, he says, “Breathe, Jask. In, out. In, out.” He coaches her through it until she’s managed a semblance of control. Hates that he knows how to do this because he’s done it before. Hates that he knows he’ll likely have to do it again. “Good,” he says, and adds, “You’re safe here.”

Looking not at him but past him, over his shoulder to the far wall, she says, “They killed my horse.” Her is flat, and the tears end. 

“They?” Yen says, edging on noticeably distressed. Though they suspected as much, as rarely anyone but witchers and sorceresses travel the roads alone, confirmation is far from validating. 

“Two,” Jask says, and bends again, her elbow now on her knee and her head bowed, the hand Geralt doesn’t hold tangled in her hair. “I tried to talk—I just froze. I always just _ free _ —Fuck. Why didn’t it—”

_ Work _ . It’s easy to fill the blank. Early in their time as travel companions, he learned her policy for dealing with others’ advances is appeasement. That doesn’t work on the road. Men who rape women out alone in winter only want that: violence. 

Explaining as much won’t help. 

Instead, he asks, “How badly are you hurt?” Though he saw her injuries, there can always be more he doesn’t see. 

She shakes her head. “Everything,” she says. “Everything hurts. I was wake but it’s—I don’t, I don’t remember, not all of it.” Her fingers curl over Geralt’s palm, the grip tight. “I’m cold.”

“I know,” Yen says. Jaskier exudes it. “It’s all right that you didn’t fight. You would be worse if you had.” Or she would be dead, but neither of them say that. 

Then she laughs, briefs and high pitched. “I can’t,” she says. “I’m so—I don’t even  _ try _ and now I just  _ let _ two soldiers—I haven’t learned anything, have I? I always try to make it easier so I won’t get hurt because I’m too  _ stupid _ to ever, to ever. Like I was too stupid back then to realise what was happening until he already—what fourteen-year-old doesn’t recognise  _ sex,  _ you know? And then I ran into him again and I couldn’t even do anything but smile and now—now it’s been fourteen fucking years and I’m still just as use—” 

The tears gain momentum by the end, drowning what else she might say. Geralt stares at Yen, who stares back in silently communicated horror. For her to have never learned this through her casual invasion of other people’s privacy only makes it worse.

Turning her attention from him, she says, “This is no fault of yours. It never has been.” She says it firmly, and leaves no space for protest. “These soldiers and that man made the conscious decision to hurt you. You don’t have the training to fight two armed men. A child can’t be expected to fight against an adult she trusted, especially when he fed her wine for hours.”

Now she has it, what secret Jask buried. “Was this in Oxenfurt?” he asks her, though really, the question is for Yen, who nods minutely. “Jask. Jaskier. Stay. Here, in Kaer Moren. I’m not saying always. But we need to be here more now for Ciri. If you don’t want to go to the city in autumn, stay here. Fuck Oxenfurt. You don’t need to torture yourself.” 

He wants a reaction, any, and receives none. Then Yen says, “And don’t go to Vizima for the frost. Recover first,” and Jask’s head snaps back up so quickly she nearly knocks her in the nose. 

“I have to go,” she says, the first re-emerging signs of panic fraying her words. “They’ve already paid me.” 

“Then at least don’t go alone,” Yen says. 

“We’re both training Ciri,” Geralt adds. “One of us can stay here and the other can join you.”

Jaskier’s mouth twists. “ _ Really? _ ” she says. “Little late, don’t you think?”

The bitter cast stings like a bruise in its own right, because it’s true. Her lips pressed into a line, Yen says, “Yes, it is. But we can avoid a third incident, and anyone pressuring you.”

“Not just Vizima,” he says, as a promise to himself as much as to Jaskier. “The world’s different. You shouldn’t travel alone anyway.” 

When the flash of anger comes, it burns bright and hot and fast. “I’m human, but I’m not a child,” she snaps. “You aren’t obligated to protect me. I’m not your wife.”

All at once, Yen goes white, and though Geralt doesn’t, he’s sure that to the two of them, his guilt is just as transparent. There’s a correct response to that, but he doesn’t know it. His tongue is heavy, awkward. Though Jask hasn’t moved her hand from his, nor shied from Yen’s embrace, her every muscle is rigid. Fear, not of them but something more abstract, laces into the air like it means to stay. 

Even if Yen’s understanding of people is also limited, in its own way, she’s always been better at finding the right words for Jaskier. “No, you’re not a wife,” she says. “None of us have a life that leads to husbands or wives, but we’re asking you to stay. For people like us three, isn’t that the same thing?”

“But you’ll leave again. You always, always leave and I end up right back where I started—”

“Not again,” Geralt says. Promises. “Not this time.”

She reaches for him, dragging Yen with her, until she’s on her knees with one arm around his neck and her opposite hand still between his, Yen curled around the two of them. They say nothing, because there’s no need. For as little as Geralt understands about love, he knows that the three of them are a tangle of it, knotted together too tightly for destiny or tragedy to rent apart, and when Jaskier’s death finally comes, the part of his soul she owns will go with her to the grave. 

**Author's Note:**

> There might be one more story to this series? Two? (More?)


End file.
